The Structural Modeling Project

A Disciplined Approach to the Development of Platform
Architectures [abstract] (PDF)David I. August, Kurt Keutzer, Sharad Malik, and A. Richard NewtonProceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Synthesis and System
Integration of Mixed Technologies (SASIMI), April 2001.
Invited.

Silicon capability has enabled the embedding of an entire
system on a single silicon die. These devices are known as
systems-on-achip (SOC). Currently, the design of these devices is
undisciplined, expensive, and risky. One way of amortizing the cost
and ameliorating this design risk is to make a single integrated
circuit serve multiple applications, and the natural way of enabling
this is through end-user programmability. The aim of the MESCAL
project, which is the subject of this paper, is to introduce a
disciplined approach to producing reusable architectural platforms
that can be easily programmed to meet a variety of
applications. (MESCAL stands for Modern Embedded Systems, Compilers,
Architectures, and Languages.)